Back to Normal: the Voters Have Their Say

The election is over. The people have had their say. The voters have issued the ultimate verdict.

Starting Wednesday, it is back to reality, back to normal, back to needing a strong, sensible, heads up city government that is able to maneuver Revere around one of the worst economic periods we have experienced since the end of the Great Depression.

Our leaders here will need to be on their toes to overcome the problems associated with high unemployment, no job expansion, very little growth in the local economy and fixed costs going higher every year and threatening the fiscal stability of the city.

The new mayor faces all of this, and in fact, he faces more.

The future has never, in our lives, seemed less certain than it does today. Everything about our lives has changed with the recession that began with the near collapse of the economy at the end of 2007.

Here it is, 2011, and we’re still spinning our wheels trying to get ahead while the tendency is for most working class and middle class people to be falling further behind.

Only the very rich and the strong upper middle class  remain unaffected by the recession and the changed American economy.

It is hard to imagine returning to the good old days of 5-6 percent growth. We seem stuck in a new economic age – failing to move forward and instead, slipping backward.

However, all is not lost.

The bad economy will not remain bad forever.

Everything that is up comes down.

Everything that is down goes up once again.

The economy is cyclical. Right now we’re in the worst part of the cycle.

It is hard to imagine how we will be in five years except to say that we might be out of all this doom and gloom with the economy rejuvenated and totally recovered from this lingering and pervasive recession.

We cannot know this anymore than we can know when the bottom has been reached – and in many ways, it appears we have already reached bottom and the economy is struggling to regain its footing before moving ahead.

We cannot know what awaits us until we get there and then for many of us it is too late to do anything about the predicament we find ourselves in.

The city’s financial condition is precarious. There is a very fine line between solvency and insolvency.

Our new mayor will find that his most important achievement will be to keep Revere steady and its complicated finances above water.

If he does that during this difficult time, then he will have achieved a lot.

Good luck to the new mayor-elect.

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